Wood-apple fruit




Wood-apple fruit purchased from market in Pune, India Scientific classification

Kingdom: Plantae

Angiosperms

Eudicots

Rosids Order:

Sapindales Family: Rutaceae Subfamily: Aurantioideae Tribe: Citreae Genus: LimoniaL. Species: L. acidissima Binomial name Limonia acidissimaL. Limonia acidissima (syn. Feronia elephantum, Feronia limonia, Hesperethusa crenulata, Schinus limonia) is the only species within the monotypic genus Limonia, native to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and southeast Asia east to Java. Vernacular names include wood-apple, elephant-apple, monkey fruit, and curd fruit in English and a variety of names in the languages of its native area.

Cultivation and uses of wood Apple

Cultivation and uses in Talakona forest, in Chittoor District of Andhra Pradesh, India.The unripe fruit is described as astringent and is used in combination with bela and other medicines in diarrhoea and dysentery. The ripe fruit is said to be useful in hiccup and affections of the throat. The leaves are aromatic and carminative. The scooped-out pulp from its fruits is eaten raw with or without sugar, or is blended with coconut milk and palm-sugar syrup and drunk as a beverage, or frozen as an ice cream. It is also used in chutneys and for making jelly and jam. The fruit is much used in India as a liver and cardiac tonic, and, when unripe, as an astringent means of halting diarrhea and dysentery and effective treatment for hiccough, sore throat and diseases of the gums. The pulp is poulticed onto bites and stings of venomous insects, as is the powdered rind. Leaves, bark, roots and fruit pulp are all used against snakebite.
The fruit is eaten plain, mixed into a variety of beverages and desserts, or preserved as jam. The rind of the fruit is so thick and hard it can be carved and used as a utensil such as a bowl or ashtray. The bark also produces an edible gum. The tree has hard wood which can be used for woodworking. This species has numerous described medicinal uses as well. Ground limonia bark is also used as a cosmetic called thanakha in Southeast Asia.

THE YAJUR VEDA mentions the bael tree, but the Charaka Samhita, an Ayurveda treatise from the 1st millennium BC, was the first book to describe its medicinal properties. Hindu scriptures abound in references to the bael tree and its leaves. The devotees of Lord Shiva commonly offer bael leaves to the deity, especially on Shivaratri; this probably explains why bael trees are so common near temples. Hindus also believe that goddess Lakshmi resides in bael leaves.

As food: Indonesians beat the pulp of the ripe fruit with palm sugar and eat the mixture at breakfast. The sweetened pulp is a source of sherbet in the subcontinent. Jam, pickle, marmalade, syrup, jelly, squash and toffee are some of the products of this versatile fruit. Young bael leaves are a salad green in Thailand. Indians eat the pulp of the ripe fruit with sugar or jaggery. The ripe pulp is also used to make chutney. The Raw pulp is mixed with yoghurt and make into raita. The raw pulp is sour in taste, while the ripe pulp would be having a smell and thaste thats mixture of sourness and sweet.

Other uses: Bael fruit pulp has a soap-like action that made it a household cleaner for hundreds of years. The sticky layer around the unripe seeds is household glue that also finds use in jewellery-making. The glue, mixed with lime, waterproofs wells and cements walls. The glue also protects oil paintings when added as a coat on the canvas. The fruit rind yields oil that is popular as a fragrance for hair; it also produces a dye used to colour silks and calico.

Nutrition: A hundred gm of bael fruit pulp contains 31 gm of carbohydrate and two gm of protein, which adds up to nearly 140 calories. The ripe fruit is rich in beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A; it also contains significant quantities of the B vitamins thiamine and riboflavin, and small amounts of Vitamin C. Wild bael fruit tends to have more tannin than the cultivated ones; tannin depletes the body of precious nutrients, and evidence suggests it can cause cancer.

Medicinal uses: The bael fruit is more popular as medicine than as food. The tannin in bael has an astringent effect that once led to its use as a general tonic and as a traditional cure for dysentery, diarrhoea, liver ailments, chronic cough and indigestion. In fact, Vasco da Gama's men, suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery in India, turned to the bael fruit for relief. The root juice was once popular as a remedy for snakebites.
The seed oil is a purgative, and the leaf juice mixed with honey is a folk remedy for fever. The tannin-rich and alkaloid-rich bark decoction is a folk cure for malaria.

Watermelon Fruits




Watermelon Scientific classification Kingdom: Plantae Division: Magnoliophyta Class: Magnoliopsida Order: Cucurbitales Family: Cucurbitaceae Genus: Citrullus Species: C. lanatus Binomial name Citrullus lanatus(Thunb.) Matsum. & Nakai Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum & Nakai, family Cucurbitaceae) can be both the fruit and the plant of a vine-like (scrambler and trailer) herb originally from southern Africa and one of the most common types of melon. This flowering plant produces a special type of fruit known by botanists as a pepo, a berry, which has a thick rind (exocarp) and fleshy center (mesocarp and endocarp); pepos are derived from an inferior ovary and are characteristic of the Cucurbitaceae. The watermelon fruit, loosely considered a type of melon (although not in the genus Cucumis), has a smooth exterior rind (green, yellow, and sometimes white) and a juicy, sweet interior flesh (usually pink, but sometimes orange, yellow, red, and sometimes green if not ripe).

History and Nutrition of Watermelon

HistoryWatermelon is thought to have originated in southern Africa, where it is found growing wild, because it reaches maximum genetic diversity resulting in sweet, bland and bitter forms there. Alphonse de Candolle, in 1882, already considered the evidence sufficient to prove that watermelon was indigenous to tropical Africa.[2] Though Citrullus colocynthis is often considered to be a wild ancestor of watermelon, and is now found native in north and west Africa, Fenny Dane and Jiarong Liu, suggest on the basis of chloroplast DNA investigations, that the cultivated and wild watermelon appear to have diverged independently from a common ancestor, possibly C. ecirrhosus from Namibia.

A close-up of a watermelon leafIt is not known when the plant was first cultivated, but Zohary and Hopf note evidence of its cultivation in the Nile Valley from at least as early as the second millennium BC. Although watermelon is not depicted in any Egyptian hieroglyphic text nor does any ancient writer mention it, finds of the characteristically large seed are reported in Twelfth dynasty sites; numerous watermelon seeds were recovered from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

By the 10th century AD, watermelons were being cultivated in China, which is today the world's single largest watermelon producer. By the 13th century, Moorish invaders had introduced the fruit to Europe; and, according to John Mariani's The Dictionary of American Food and Drink, "watermelon" made its first appearance in an English dictionary in 1615.

In Vietnam, legend holds that watermelon was discovered in Vietnam long before it reached China, in the era of the Hùng Kings. According to legend, watermelon was discovered by Prince Mai An Tiêm, an adopted son of the 11th Hùng King. When he was exiled unjustly to an island, he was told that if he could survive for six months, he would be allowed to return. When he prayed for guidance, a bird flew past and dropped a seed. He cultivated the seed and called its fruit "dua tây" or western melon, because the birds who ate it flew from the west. When the Chinese took over Vietnam in about 110 BC, they called the melons "dua h?o" (good melon) or "dua h?u", "dua Tây", "dua h?o", "dua h?u"—all words for "watermelon". An Tiêm's island is now a peninsula in the suburban district of Nga Son.

Watermelons on display by a roadside vendor in Delhi, IndiaMuseums Online South Africa list watermelons as having been introduced to North American Indians in the 1500s. Early French explorers found Native Americans cultivating the fruit in the Mississippi Valley. Many sources list the watermelon as being introduced in Massachusetts as early as 1629. Southern food historian John Egerton has said he believes African slaves helped introduce the watermelon to the United States. Texas Agricultural Extension horticulturalist Jerry Parsons lists African slaves and European colonists as having distributed watermelons to many areas of the world. Parsons also mentions the crop being farmed by Native Americans in Florida (by 1664) and the Colorado River area (by 1799). Other early watermelon sightings include the Midwestern states (1673), Connecticut (1747), and the Illiana region (1822).

Charles Fredric Andrus, a horticulturist at the USDA Vegetable Breeding Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina, set out to produce a disease-resistant and wilt-resistant watermelon. The result was "that gray melon from Charleston." Its oblong shape and hard rind made it easy to stack and ship. Its adaptability meant it could be grown over a wide geographical area. It produced high yields and was resistant to the most serious watermelon diseases: anthracnose and fusarium wilt.
Square watermelon from JapanToday, farmers in approximately 44 states in the U.S. grow watermelon commercially, and almost all these varieties have some Charleston Gray in their lineage. Georgia, Florida, Texas, California and Arizona are the USA's largest watermelon producers.

This now-common watermelon is often large enough that groceries often sell half or quarter melons. There are also some smaller, spherical varieties of watermelon, both red- and yellow-fleshed, sometimes called "icebox melons."
In Japan, farmers of the Zentsuji region found a way to grow cubic watermelons, by growing the fruits in glass boxes and letting them naturally assume the shape of the receptacle. The square shape is designed to make the melons easier to stack and store, but the square watermelons are often more than double the price of normal ones. Pyramid shaped watermelons have also been developed and any polygonal shape may potentially also be used.

Culture Flower stems of male and female watermelon blossoms, showing ovary (incipient fruit if pollinated) on the femaleFor commercial plantings, one beehive per acre (over 9,000 m² per hive) is the minimum recommendation by the US Department of Agriculture for pollination of conventional, seeded varieties. Because seedless hybrids have sterile pollen; pollinizer rows of varieties with viable pollen must also be planted. Since the supply of viable pollen is reduced and pollination is much more critical in producing the seedless variety, the recommended number of hives per acre, or pollinator density, increases to three hives per acre (1,300 m² per hive).
Seedless watermelonNutritionWatermelon, raw (edible parts) Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz) Energy 127 kJ (30 kcal) Carbohydrates 7.55 g Sugars 6.2 g Dietary fiber 0.4 g Fat 0.15 g Protein 0.61 g Water 91.45 g Vitamin A equiv. 28 µg (3%) Thiamine (Vit. B1) 0.033 mg (3%) Riboflavin (Vit. B2) 0.021 mg (1%) Niacin (Vit. B3) 0.178 mg (1%) Pantothenic acid (B5) 0.221 mg (4%) Vitamin B6 0.045 mg (3%) Folate (Vit. B9) 3 µg (1%) Vitamin C 8.1 mg (14%) Calcium 7 mg (1%) Iron 0.24 mg (2%) Magnesium 10 mg (3%) Phosphorus 11 mg (2%) Potassium 112 mg (2%) Zinc 0.10 mg (1%) Percentages are relative to US recommendations for adults.